Author Archives: Kars
So yeah we’ve moved
If you look in the footer of this website, or on its contact page, you’ll see a new address. Neude 5, Utrecht, NL. We’ve been happy renters at the Dutch Game Garden for almost two years now so when they announced their move to a new location of course we wanted to stick with them [...]
Join us for a game of Bocce Drift
So we have five sets of bocce balls lying around (or jeu de boules, as we like to call the game in the Netherlands). They’re left over from our little stint at NU Grounds. We were planning to run Bocce Drift there, but did not get around to it. So let’s play it anyway, in [...]
Games we ran at NU Grounds
On a scorchingly hot Saturday afternoon several agents of Hubbub descended on the Utrecht area of Leidsche Rijn to run a number of physical social games at the NU Grounds festival. We played a mix of games designed by students of the Utrecht School of the Arts and games taken from the excellent Ludocity website. [...]
Posted in Projects Tagged Cultuur19, events, Leidsche Rijn, pervasive games, urban games Leave a comment
You don’t put a game in a computer; my first column for Bashers
Here’s the first column I’ve written for Bashers, the premier source of games journalism in the Netherlands. I’m planning to devote subsequent columns to discussions of other pervasive games. Many thanks to Niels ‘t Hooft for indulging me. Do you know a game called Cruel 2 B Kind? It works like this: the goal is [...]
Posted in Articles Tagged Area/Code, Backgammon, Bashers, columns, Cruel 2 B Kind, Far Cry 2, game design, pervasive games, rants, Space War! Leave a comment
An interview with Kars in a book on Utrecht creatives
A few weeks ago Xpert CMKB presented a book on creative entrepeneurs in the city of Utrecht at Kunstgras 2010. I’m quite flattered to have an interview with myself included. Below are photos of the pages in question with links to high resolution shots on Flickr.1 Read about why I started Hubbub and what it [...]
Posted in Publicity Tagged books, interviews, Kunstgras 2010, We Love Creatief Utrecht, Xpert CMKB Leave a comment
Join us for playful meanderings through Leidsche Rijn this saturday
I’ve always found neighborhoods under construction curious places. There is a strange tension between the place as planned and the place as executed and subsequently lived in. Leidsche Rijn is a new neighborhood being built in Utrecht (which is my hometown and also where Hubbub’s studio is located). When it is finished in 2025 it [...]
Posted in Upcoming Tagged Cultuur 19, events, festivals, Leidsche Rijn, NU Grounds, urban games Leave a comment
Upcoming lecture on pervasive games at CIID
Finally, I get to lecture at my favorite interaction design institute, the CIID. If you’re in the Copenhagen area, do come along. Here’s the description: It seems that the brave new playful world promised by pervasive/urban/locative/alternate-reality games mavens of the past decade hasn’t really materialized. Gaming hasn’t left the living room much, it still mostly [...]
Making cultural events more playful
These are sketches from a presentation that I delivered a while back to a room full of organizers of cultural events and creative agencies from Utrecht. This was the culmination of a study commissioned by the city of Utrecht, in which we looked at ways of adding playful elements to the programs of some of [...]


PLAY Pilots is live